Monday, January 26, 2015

The strike of Milwaukee's packinghouse workers that changed Milwaukee

Forty
years ago the owners of Milwaukee’s meat packing plants launched a war on
unions. Milwaukee’s working class is still suffering from losing that war.

On
January 25, 1975, over 700 members of Local 248, Meat and Allied Foodworkers
Union, struck Milwaukee area meatpacking plants in response to a proposal
that would cut their wages.

For
generations, Milwaukee boasted of a large, unionized, blue-collar middle class.
It was a place to put down roots and raise a family. Neighborhood culture was
often defined by industrial bowling leagues and neighborhood taverns owned by
former factory workers seeking to be “their own boss” and escape assembly line
drudgery.

While
highly segregated, economic inequality was at historic lows. Milwaukeeans
enjoyed the nation’s second highest median household income in 1969. The black
poverty rate was 22% lower than the U.S. average in 1970, and African American
median family income was 19% higher than the U.S. African American median.

As
the 70’s began the Wall Street Journal
dubbed the city the “Star of the Snowbelt.” In large part, this reflected the
high rates of unionization among workers laboring in Milwaukee’s foundries,
tanneries, meatpacking plants, and at manufacturing firms like A.O. Smith and
Allis Chalmers.

Skilled
tradesmen and foundrymen, teachers, retail clerks, unskilled and semi-skilled
workers were represented by unions at the bargaining table, on the job and in
elections. Because of union wages and benefits, they could buy their
own homes and maybe a cabin up north or a fishing boat. While neither management
nor workers sought strikes, they were tolerated as a legitimate, although
undesirable, part of contract negotiations.

In
the late 60s and early 70s, Milwaukee unions participated in a national strike
wave as workers sought salary increases in response to war-induced inflation.
In 1969 Schlitz workers and MATC’s faculty union struck. In 1973 workers from
A.O. Smith, Briggs and Stratton and Harley Davidson, three of Milwaukee’s
manufacturing elite, struck at the same time. These strikes were
eventually resolved, new contracts signed, and none of these companies
attempted to bust the unions.

All
of this changed in 1975 with the Meatcutters’ strike. The very day the strike
began, the eight companies represented by the Milwaukee Independent Meatpackers
Association began hiring replacement workers, some recruited from as far away
as Nebraska and Texas.

In
response to this first attempt by Milwaukee employers to bust a union since
World War II, the Menominee Valley filled with angry picketers, black, Latino
and white, rallying to protect their jobs.

After
15 months the employers association had their victory and decertified the
union. Hundreds of hard-working union men lost their jobs. Full-time permanent
employees were replaced by low-wage workers frequently hired through temp
agencies.

The
strike legitimized replacement workers, beginning waves of attacks on unions
and the city’s working class. When UAW workers struck Master Lock in 1979,
Milwaukee police officers escorted replacement workers across the picket line. Two
years later A.O. Smith built a non-union plant in Tennessee, the first nail in the coffin
of its Milwaukee Automotive Works, which had dominated the city’s north side
since the early 1920s.

Briggs
and Stratton experienced another strike in 1983 after its local unions refused demands
for concessions in wages, benefits and work rules. Following the 13 week
strike, the company asserting that it would never be held hostage again began to relocate work to the low-wage, non-union south.

While
many associate the war against labor with President Reagan’s firing of the
nation’s striking air traffic controllers in 1981, it actually began much
earlier.

In
1971, Lewis F. Powell Jr., a Republican corporate lawyer, called the business
community to arms with his memorandum to the National Chamber of Commerce. He
wrote: “The American system is under attack. Business must learn ... that
political power must be assiduously cultivated…and used aggressively and with
determination -- without embarrassment.”

Powell
urged “American business” to demand “equal time” on college campuses and the
nation’s airwaves. His memorandum inspired the founding of conservative think
tanks like the Heritage Foundation, Milwaukee’s Bradley Foundation, and the
Cato Institute. Wealthy businessmen like the Koch Brothers poured tens of
millions of dollars into right-wing initiatives.

Business
Week put it bluntly when it declared in its October 12, 1974 issue: “Some
people will obviously have to do with less….it will be a bitter pill for many
Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have
more.”

Milwaukee’s
meatcutters had the misfortune of being Milwaukee’s first victims in this war
to redistribute income. Subsequently, replacement workers were used at Master
Lock and to break the union at Patrick Cudahy in 1987. After these bitter
defeats Milwaukee area union membership plummeted, and so did real hourly
wages.

Bernie
Peck, the owner of the largest meatpacker, Peck Meat Packing, bought up most of
the smaller meatpacking companies during the strike. He eventually sold them to
Emmber Foods and became a celebrated philanthropist. While
the community enjoys the buildings named after him, Milwaukee’s working class paid
such a very heavy price that many cannot
afford to buy a home much less a cabin up north.

The
corporate class war against Milwaukee’s workers that began with Local 248’s
defeat is one of the principle reasons Milwaukee has declined from a relatively
prosperous, blue-collar, middle class town to one of the nation’s poorest
cities.

Since
1979 private sector union membership has plummeted while Milwaukee’s median household income has fallen
by a staggering 25.4 percent.

Milwaukee's
African American poverty rate is now 49% higher than the African American national
average, and median income is 30% lower.

Local
248 was one of many industrial unions organized by the Greatest Generation that
turned low-paying jobs into stable, middle class employment. Today, many of
Milwaukee’s large unionized, manufacturing plants are gone, replaced by
low-paying big box retail and service sector jobs.

If
Milwaukee is to enjoy a broadly shared renaissance, the current generation of
underpaid workers will need to learn from history and create 21st century
unions that turn low-paying employment into middle class jobs.